Wave

"Yes, it wasn’t too hard to decide to give her the prize, although there were other amazing illustrators, too. Wave is about a little girl who goes to the ocean. She is quite cautious and keeps her distance from the wave but then she begins to interact with it, until it gets a bit too close for comfort and she gets rolled over by the wave, but ends up with a gift of shells that the wave has offered to her. This book is a very good example in a wordless picture book of reading emotions in the characters, which allows you to understand a character’s motivations. By looking at not only the little girl’s face but also her body posture and the way she is leaning forward or leaning back, the gestures that she’s making — she sticks out her tongue at the wave — I think even a very young child would be able to identify those emotions and empathise with them, to read fear or shock or pleasure. When the girl is dancing in the waves, it’s an expression of joy that comes across so strongly. But interestingly, one could say the wave also has emotions. Suzy Lee is such a brilliant, talented illustrator that, at one point, the wave seems to have its own attitude towards the girl. It’s not an aggressive attitude, you can tell that it’s an invitation to play. Somehow, with brush strokes, she’s managed to convey water that is happy. Yes, Mirror , Wave and Shadow are the three books that make up what Lee calls ‘ The Border Trilogy ’. They all have a little girl as a character who is playing with the other side of the page, literally, because Suzy Lee uses the gutter in a very clever way to separate the pages and to act as a border between reality and that other place of almost magic, which can be either shadows or the other little girl in the mirror. At some point, they come together. At the beginning, the girl and the wave are separated; in the end there is a continuum between the beach, the girl and the wave."